Tag Geography

Erika Marín-Spiotta is partnering with scientific societies and geoscience faculty colleagues from across the country to develop bystander intervention training for the earth, space and environmental sciences.

Staff at the Arthur H. Robinson Map Library at the University of Wisconsin–Madison used their resources to help track down the site where a 130-ton B-52 bomber crashed in the dark on Nov. 18, 1966, near unincorporated Hauer in Sawyer County in northwestern Wisconsin.

As with rivers, civilizations across the world rise and fall. Sometimes, the rise and fall of rivers has something to do with it. At Cahokia, the largest prehistoric settlement in the Americas north of Mexico, new evidence suggests that major flood events in the Mississippi River valley are tied to the cultural center’s emergence and ultimately, to its decline.

Soils that formed on the Earth’s surface thousands of years ago and that are now deeply buried features of vanished landscapes have been found to be rich in carbon, adding a new dimension to our planet’s carbon cycle.

In stories, maps lead to treasure. But in real life, maps are the treasure. They reveal history, showing us how we once viewed our world, and help us understand the world as it exists now. And sometimes they hold mysteries of their own.

The UW–Madison campus will bring together experts from around Wisconsin on Wednesday, Nov. 16 to show off the latest in technologies and projects that utilize high-tech mapping tools called geographic information systems (GIS).

If so many poor people live around national parks in developing countries, does that mean that these parks are contributing to their poverty? Yes, according to the conventional wisdom, but no, according to a 10-year study of people living around Kibale National Park in Uganda that was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Roughly 15,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, North America's vast assemblage of large animals - including such iconic creatures as mammoths, mastodons, camels, horses, ground sloths and giant beavers - began their precipitous slide to extinction.

Experts from around Wisconsin will show off the latest in technologies and projects that use high-tech mapping tools called geographic information systems (GIS) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison on Friday, Nov. 20.